This deserves its own post:
From John Kowalko:
Ladies and gentlemen,
You have the advantage of witnessing the final morphing of Charlie Copeland into a Rick Jensen of the blogosphere.
Charlie has taken no verifiable facts, added a dose of false accusations, sprinkled in some blame without regard to any sense of honesty, shaken with a dose of pretend compassion for those who will suffer job losses and “VIOLA:” A political issue born of a nonsensical ignorance of reality, to be applied liberally to the Republican campaign of your choosing.
Valero is a company comprised of Oil Refineries. They have no vested interest in oil reserves, community engagement or fairness to the average worker. They are the modern day carpetbagger. They lease the car, hit the potholes and ignore the deterioration because at the end of the day they will turn it back in to be another’s problem.
Every day that they produce a gallon of gasoline at peak price is a day of celebration and corporate contentment. Every day that they reinvest in infrastructural maintenance or preventative equipment upgrades can be recorded by a lunar eclipse.
A little dollop of truth for Charlie, Valero was excluded from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative recently enacted. Although contributing a disproportionate amount of Carbon Dioxide releases from their energy generating plant they begged for the exemption,threatening organized labor with layoffs, lobbying that the costs passed through to the consumer would be unbearable. So not willing to risk that substantial negative economic impact I struck my amendment to include the refinery (as it should have been) although I voted against the RGGI initiative because of that and other reasons. I am not particularly proud that I succumbed to fear-mongering tactics.
Now the next chapter unfolded. The refinery shut down its pollution spewing Coker under the guise of cost savings and continued to run the facility with little regard to routine maintenance as long as gasoline was topping $4gal. This ill considered attitude soon had its negative impact and they experienced a major unscheduled shutdown. None of this was a result of over regulation, interference by environmental constrictions or provoked by the Democratic Administration of Gov. Markell or the newly acquired majority in the House.
The last owner in the half-dozen or so transitions that I personally experienced that had a preventative maintenance and legitimate quality control program in place with the monetary commitment to its success was the Motiva owners. The grueling process of refining oil and the toll it takes on men and equipment cannot maintain the pace to satisfy the thirst for profit if you exclude the costs of proper and safe maintenance of that equipment and your workforce.
The refinery was never in safer hands than when it was 100% unionized. When different owners would compare the profit loss margin of the Delaware City Refinery with their other facilities they would present a bottom line (ignoring the higher operational expenses of a facility capable of refining dirty/sour crude) and not including the massive losses of life and destruction that would too often occur in their non-union Port Arthur Texas plant or any of their other non-union Louisiana/Southwest facilities.
So Charlie its about time to dump the Jensen facade of innuendo, misrepresentations. You’re much too intelligent to truly believe some of the things you say.
Respectfully,
John Kowalko